Boston Debate in the News

The Boston Herald ran an article this morning about the Boston Debate League and one of its member schools which was nearly closed by the school district:

The debate team at the Academy of Public Service sailed into the “elite eight” last year at the national championships in Chicago.

Now, thanks to that oratorical success, the debaters have talked their way into another year of funding as their school merges with the nearby Noonan Business Academy in Codman Square.

“The output of the debate team was a big part of the decision,” said team coach Locksley Bryan. “They saw these kids doing academic calisthenics at a very high level and it impressed them.”

The backstory, as I understand it, is that several years ago the Boston Public Schools received a multi-year, multi-million-dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support a transition to small schools. The grant funded the dissolution of Boston’s large public high schools into multiple small schools sharing a single building. Thus, what was Dorchester High School became three schools within the renamed Dorchester Education Complex: Tech Boston, Noonan Business Academy, and the Academy of Public Service (APS).

Dorchester is one of the more troubled neighborhoods in Boston, and these schools had more than their share of problems. APS, however, was fortunate enough to have a wonderful headmaster and several great teachers who saw the value that a debate team could have for their students and their school. They got in touch with me, and I helped them start such a program three years ago.

Thanks to the efforts of the aforementioned faculty, APS quickly became one of the most successful schools in the League, putting up some of the best participation numbers and repeatedly taking top honors at citywide competitions. This was a big deal for a school that used to be known derogatorily among Boston’s young people as “Dumbchester”.

The Gates grant expires at the end of the current school year, and BPS seems to be reconsolidating some (though not nearly all) of the small schools it created. APS was slated to be absorbed by the more popular Tech Boston and its students dispersed. However, teachers, faculty, students, alumni, and community members rallied in support of their school. As the most eloquent orators, several of the debaters took leadership roles in this effort, speaking before the Boston Schools Committee about the value of the Academy of Public Service. The debate team was one of the flagship programs to which they pointed as evidence of the school’s success.

As an organization, we’ve learned a lot from this event. We’ve come to appreciate more fully how much a debate team can transform a school culture, ultimately affecting even non-debaters in a positive way. When intellectual competition takes on the fun, excitement, credibility, and even popularity of a sports team at a school, that school is bound to improve. Joining the debate team becomes a cool, or at least socially acceptable, thing to do, and more kids get into it. These students, and the teachers who coach them, bring their newly acquired skills into their classrooms, raising the quality of the class for all its students.

An alumnus of the APS debate team who now volunteers as a judge at our competitions put it best when he told me, “If they had said three years ago that they wanted to close APS, I wouldn’t have argued with them. It was a bad school. But it changed when the debate team came along. Debate turned around a lot of kids lives. Kids who were going to drop out started coming to school again so they could debate. It’s a much better school now and I don’t think they should close it.”